Quotes About Reality

To select only monuments supresses at one stroke the reality of the land and that of its people, it accounts for nothing of the present, that is, nothing historical, and as a consequence, the monuments themselves become undecipherable, therefore senseless. What is to be seen is thus constantly in the process of vanishing, and the Guide becomes, through an operation common to all mystifications, the very opposite of what it advertises, an agent of blindness.

I-love-you is active. It affirms itself as force--against other forces. Which ones? The thousand forces of the world, which are, all of them, disparaging forces (science, doxa, reality, reason, etc) Or again: against language.

The dream: to know a foreign language yet not to understand it: to perceive the difference in it without that difference ever being recuperated by the superficial sociality of discourse, communication or vulgarity... to undo our own "reality" under the effect of other formulations, other syntaxes... in a word, to descend into the untranslatable.

A conjuring trick has taken place; it has turned reality inside out, it has emptied it of history and has filled it with nature, it has removed from things their human meaning so as to make them signify a human insignificance. The function of myth is to empty reality: it is, literally , a ceaseless flowing out, a haemorrhage, or perhaps an evaporation, in short a perceptible absence

In reality, it is unimportant that I have no likelihood of being really fulfilled (I am quite willing for this to be the case). Only the will to fulfillment shines, indestructible, before me.

I experience reality as a system of power. Coluche, the restaurant, the painter, Rome on a holiday, everything imposes on me its system of being; everyone is *badly behaved*. Isn't their impoliteness merely a *plenitude*? The world is full, plenitude is its system, and as a final offense this system is presented as a nature with which I must sustain good relations: in order to be normal (exempt from love)... —from_A Lover's Discourse: Fragments_

one can conceive of very ancient myths, but there are no eternal ones; for it is human history which converts reality into speech, and it alone rules the life and the death of mythical language. Ancient or not, mythology can only have an historical foundation, for myth is a type of speech chosen by history…

Truth to tell, what is invested in the concept is less reality than a certain knowledge of reality; in passing from the meaning to the form, the image loses some knowledge: the better to receive the knowledge in the concept. In actual fact, the knowledge contained in a mythical concept is confused, made of yielding, shapeless associations.

D. Rockefeller drew strength by simplifying reality and strongly believed that excessive reflection upon unpleasant but unalterable events only weakened one's resolve in the face of enemies.

In reality, he was fully prepared to deal with a strong producers' cartel so long as they capped production.

like insects on a rubber sheet, we live in a universe whose true form is hidden from direct view.

The universe has a much greater imagination than we do, which is why the real story of the universe is far more interesting than any of the fairy tales we have invented to describe it.

Finally, and inevitably, the flat universe will further flatten into a nothingness that mirrors its beginning. Not only will there be no cosmologists to look out on the universe, there will be nothing for them to see even if they could. Nothing at all. Not even atoms. Nothing. If you think that's bleak and cheerless, too bad. Reality doesn't owe us comfort.

We need to live our experience as it is and with our eyes open. The universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not.

But common sense is deceptive precisely because it is based on common experience.

El universo no es solamente más raro de lo que suponemos, sino más raro de lo que podemos suponer.   J. B. S. HALDANE, 1924

measurement of a system can alter its behavior

The universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not. The existence or nonexistence of a creator is independent of our desires. A world without God or purpose may seem harsh or pointless, but that alone doesn't require God to actually exist.

La realidad debe primar sobre las relaciones públicas, pues no se puede engañar a la naturaleza.   RICHARD P. FEYNMAN (1918-1988)

Maybe all of the mysteries of particle theory can be solved by invoking the same mantra: if the universe were any other way, we could not live in it.

Science fiction invites the writer to grandly explore alternative worlds and pose questions about meaning and destiny. Inventing plausible new realities is what the genre is all about. One starts from a hypothesis and then builds out the logic, adding detail and incident to give substance to imaginary structures. In that respect, science fiction and theology have much in common.

Are we ready to sell reality for a phantom?" Houston vainly asked, as propagandists and demagogues fanned the clamor for secession with deluded visions of victory. To

Habitually, and perhaps unconsciously, Hubbard would fill this gap—between reality and his interpretation of it—with mythology. This was the source of what some call his genius and others call his insanity. WHEN

The danger in holding on to a myth is that it becomes like a religion we've stopped believing in. It no longer instructs us; it only stultifies is. And besides, what do we want with a myth that makes us into people we don't want to be?